Military force is powered by software.
The drones that are used to kill suspected terrorists can identify those terrorists using the same computer vision tools that are used to identify who is in an Instagram picture. Nuclear facilities in Iran were physically disabled by the military-sponsored Stuxnet virus. National intelligence data is collected and processed using the MapReduce algorithm.
The military keeps up with technology more effectively than lawmakers. It is common to read a quote from a senator or a judge that shows a basic misunderstanding of cybersecurity. Many politicians do not even use email.
There is a large and growing knowledge gap between military capability and the technological savvy of policymakers. On the whole, government is not prepared for modern warfare.
Just like in social media information wars, the instigators of conflict have an advantage.
And the ability to instigate such a conflict is democratized. Social media, open source software, and cloud computing give a technologist superpowers. Cryptocurrencies can anonymize the financial transactions to pay for such tools, and basic encryption can anonymize the terroristic acts that occur over a remote internet connection.
Peter Warren Singer is a political scientist who formerly worked in the United States advisory committee on International Communications and Information Policy. He is also an author, whose books include Wired for War, Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know, and Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War. Peter writes about the circumstances that could lead to global warfare, and how military actors might behave in a third world war.
In this episode, Peter shares a dark, but realistic vision that we should all hope to avoid.
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